Robin Waterfield's "The Making of a King"

Robin Waterfield is an independent scholar, living in southern Greece. In addition to more than twenty-five translations of works of Greek literature, he is the author of numerous books, including Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire and Taken at the Flood: The Roman Conquest of Greece.

Waterfield applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Making of a King: Antigonus Gonatas of Macedon and the Greeks, and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Making of a King, I’m in the middle of discussing the Ptolemaic empire. Ptolemy II, having married his full sister Arsinoe (the first ever sibling marriage among the Ptolemies, but not the last) inaugurated the worship of himself and Arsinoe as the Sibling Deities. I explain that worship of a living human being as a god was not impossible within Greek religion, and that kings were especially likely to become divinized because they could be seen as performing remarkable, even miraculous deeds. And I say this about brother-sister marriage: “Brother-sister marriage was supposed to guarantee the purity of the bloodline, advertise the solidity of the royal family, and secure stability by eliminating the possibility of rival claimants to the throne; the king’s offspring would effectively be clones of himself, and so every generation of Egyptian kings took the same name.”

The page does not give a good impression of the book as a whole, except in so far as it is packed with interesting information! My book is essentially about the reign of Antigonus II Gonatas of Macedon, but I spend the first part of the book introducing his reign by giving the historical background. I go through the various threats and difficulties he was likely to face when he came to the throne, and one of the most important of these was the ongoing hostility between Macedon and Egypt. So on page 99 I’m still in the middle of explaining the Ptolemaic system with which Antigonus would have to deal. It’s the last chapter of this introductory section, and then the rest of the book is about how Antigonus gained the Macedonian kingship, and what he did with it during his long reign from 276 until 239.

Visit Robin Waterfield's website.

The Page 99 Test: Taken at the Flood.

--Marshal Zeringue